The scheduler (or CRON) is one of the features I've been most excited about us bringing to Mobile Services for some time. The need to execute code on a scheduled basis is such a common requirement that it feels great to bring the Z-factor experience to this problem.

Creating a new CRON job is super-easy. Inside your mobile service click on the SCHEDULER tab and click the CREATE button at the bottom of your screen. Setting up a schedule is so stupidly easy that I won't explain the intimate details here. However, note that you can setup a job without a schedule. This is handy if you want to start scripting before you know the schedule or, perhaps even more interestingly, you want to create a script that you can run "on demand".

This makes for a great place to keep a cleanup script, particularly handy for a demo (although you should wait until we cover the CLI in this series for the most bang there). One of my favourite uses for the scheduler's Run Once feature is the ability to quickly test and play with push notifications for your Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 or iOS device. Here's how to have some fun with push using run once.

First, you'll need to configure your application to receive push notifications - that's beyond the scope of this article but you can easily follow these tutorials to setup your Windows 8, Windows Phone or iOS app. Then you need to get a channel (or device token) for the push;

Windows 8

Once your app is all setup, quickly grabbing a channel URL for test purposes is a doddle